


Legacy

by crookperkdeck



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Gift Fic, pardon me again for any timeline/event inaccuracies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 15:09:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17144048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crookperkdeck/pseuds/crookperkdeck
Summary: Every elf has a story to tell. Behind Iorveth, there are many.





	Legacy

**Author's Note:**

> My secret santa, lauren-draws-things, wanted Iorveth or the Scoia’tael, so I did a little of both! I hope you enjoy and happy holidays!  
> If you want more Iorveth content you can also check out my playlist here: https://playmoss.com/en/sexpistols/playlist/the-time-is-all-i-own-and-time-has-come-and-gone !

              One of the younger recruits caught wind of Iorveth’s battle cry. It wasn’t him calling out that struck the recruit as unusual—his voice, bolstering everyone, was as integral to the fighting as the arrows that flew from their bows. Instead, it was _what_ Iorveth chose to shout, unheard to the recruit before that moment.

              “ _Vrihedd!_ ” Iorveth yelled, shouldering his bow and trading it for his sword in one fluid motion. He engaged with the enemy swordsman, steel upon steel, while his archers rained down support onto the humans. For a moment, the recruit looked onward, processing the cry, before aiding in the ranged assault with his own longbow.

              The battle ended in a Scoia’tael victory, with only one loss on their side. Those humans who hadn’t fallen had retreated into the forest, and Iorveth let them go, letting them spread word of his unit. They would be gone by the morning anyhow, and any reinforcements would come to find nothing. As the dusk-filled sky turned to night, the unit used the time to converse and recover from the battle.

              However, Iorveth’s cry still stuck out to the recruit, and he found his curiosity wasn’t going to quiet his thoughts. Bold enough to ask about it, but not enough to approach the commander directly, he nudged a nearby soldier to get her attention. She was an older elf, experience allowing her to be almost untouched from the previous fighting, so he didn’t feel as much guilt in bothering her.

              “You heard that earlier, didn’t you?” he asked, and her brow furrowed in response, confused by both the vagueness of the question and of being approached suddenly. “Iorveth—he called out for ‘Vrihedd’. Isn’t that the brigade that was executed? All their bodies, down in the Ravine of the Hydra?”

              Her confusion turned to irritation. “You speak their names as if they were cattle to a slaughter. They might be standing beside you, if not for those Nilfgaardian dh’oine!” she snapped. “Yes, you’ve heard correct. We lost some of our best commanders from their sacrifice, and even now we die because they couldn’t succeed. You’d have the mind to watch your questions about them.”

              The recruit put his hands up in innocence. “I understand, I understand! I just want to know why _Iorveth_ says it. He’s our commander—he should be honoring us, not them, right?”

              Her jaw tightened, and she went silent for a moment. Her next sentence was more hushed. “He _was_ one of them. Not all rest in the ravine. Iorveth is one, and there is another.”

              “Is that right?” he asked, wonder in his voice from this discovery. He glanced over at Iorveth, hidden in the darkness had it not been for the bright red of the bandana around his head. “How did he escape? Why hasn’t he told their stories before? Who is the other survivor?”

              “You ask too many questions. With not enough respect behind them,” she said with a huff, but her tone was no longer harsh. “It may inspire you, but it’s pained him. It’s pained all of us, this constant death. That we need to keep fighting after that just shows how much more needs to be done.”

              He frowned, not enjoying how discouraging the statement was. “Maybe he sees it as inspiring as well. Or else he would have given up long ago, right?”

              “Perhaps,” she said, noncommittal. “How about you go ask him yourself?”

              He stiffened, nervous, and she smiled in victory, knowing he wouldn’t dare.

-

              Marching followed the morning for the unit and went long into the afternoon. To coexist amongst the hushed sounds of the trees, they kept quiet as they moved, conversations only whispers.

              “I heard he used to be the same as you,” the female soldier said, marching beside the recruit. They had gotten better acquainted from the conversation the night before, and he felt honored from her presence, knowledgeable and skilled as she was. “Youthful, I mean. We all were, and tragedies twist us like a gnarled root, but he used to be the same in the Vrihedd. People heard his laughter as he fought and feared his grin as much as that scar now. The elves shared in his joy at meals, too. Sitting and swapping stories just like the others.”

              The recruit tried to imagine that and found too much difficulty. The last he had heard Iorveth laugh was a small chuckle the commander had to himself as he extracted one of his arrows from the head of a dead soldier. It was cold, hollow—more of an expression of personal victory.

              Even off the battlefield, when the unit was together at their meals, he sat away from them, sword at his side, guarding and eating simultaneously. Rarely did he choose to come over with the others, and the recruit often had wondered if he ever took pause in his duty. If there was a place where the commander ended and Iorveth began.

              “That’s hard to believe. That wasn’t very long ago, was it?” he asked.

              “It wasn’t. Conflict can carve decades worth of change in a single night, though. But these are just rumors; it’s your decision to take them.”

              The recruit chose not to believe it, then, and kept quiet.

-

              The two grew closer as the days went on, spending more of their idle hours of travel together, and it wasn’t until a week later that Iorveth came up again.

              “I know I shouldn’t but…Iorveth’s scar. What’s that story?”

              “You seem to think I know his entire history,” she said with some humor in her voice, which he had come to learn was her way of conceding to a question. “There’s multiple. Many cruel humans exist that are willing to do what they did to him, and many have taken claim to the act, each version more brutal than the last.”

              “Well…which do you believe?”

              She took a minute to cycle through her memory. “Redanian Secret Service. They took one of his unit—Echel Traighlethan—and he tried going after them in the night on a wild rescue mission. He was alone, because no one was willing to infiltrate one of the finest intelligence agencies for one soldier. But he was. They captured him, of course, and thought instead of imprisoning him like the other elf, they would carve up his face first. It’s as ugly of a scar because he knew when to fight back, pushing against the knife at the right moment even as the blade cut deeper into his flesh. He was lucky enough to escape, but Echel was hung—no one could have stopped that.”

              “That sounds more believable than the others I’ve heard.”

              “I’ve thought the same. But Echel and that unit both are gone, we’ll never get confirmation on that story.”

              That conclusion seemed reoccurring in multiple tales of the Scoia’tael. As inspirational as they were, it did feel like pushing a great boulder up a hill—with humans at the other side pushing back, the slope to their advantage. But Iorveth remained, and so did soldiers like this woman, and so he would, too. They could get to the other side of that hill, and then only a nudge would be needed to finish the boulder’s journey.

-

              Winter fell around them, and it grew colder with each passing day. They had to mobilize differently, to attack in the night, where the greens and browns of their uniforms wouldn’t look so stark against the snow. But it was colder during those hours, and it was creating a sharp decline in morale.

              Then Iorveth disappeared one of the nights. It wasn’t unusual, since he could act as good of a scout as a commander, and they were used to staying put while he attended to whatever business he had. If he wasn’t back within a day, they were to leave without him, believing he was captured and that they needed to make a quick escape somewhere safer. Once regrouped, a way out could be planned, but for the moment none were worried.

              Their dutiful commander came back the next evening, dragging with him a single horse-and-cart. It wasn’t very extravagant of a haul, but it got the unit’s attention nonetheless, and they hurried over in case he needed help with whatever was inside.

              Furs. Dozens of them—with this prize, they would feel not a shiver on their backs for the duration of the winter. The former owner, Iorveth claimed, had “less claim to them than the animals’ backs”, so none felt any guilt in taking them. Iorveth pulled them out and personally handed them to each soldier himself, each one scanned with a scrutinizing eye to be fit for the unit. They arranged themselves in a line to receive them, appreciation visible by the very sight of it.

              In the line, the recruit was behind another young soldier, like himself, and heard Iorveth’s voice go softer at her approach. “Here, sor’ca. I told you I’d keep my promise—no more cold nights.” She nodded, taking the fur, and went off. The recruit watched her go, small smile on her face, seeing that the coat she received was probably twice as big as she was. Iorveth wanted to make sure she was kept warm, that was clear.

              The recruit felt a fur being pushed into his hands, and turned sharply forward, forgetting he was next in line for it. He locked eyes with Iorveth, the commander who always seemed to linger on the edges of the unit, and felt intimidated suddenly by his proximity. He realized this was the last thing many humans had seen before him, ready to receive a final blow from the commander’s sword, but Iorveth providing this object meant to protect him created a much different feeling. A question stumbled out of the recruit’s mouth.

              “Why did you go do this alone?” he asked, voice coming out as brash and awkward. “I mean…we could have helped—acted as your lookouts. As we’ve done before.”

              “It was my idea, so I did it,” Iorveth answered, plainly. He reached into the cart to take another piece of fur for investigation.

              “You have many ideas and tell us to aid you with them. What makes this different?”

              “Those are _orders_ ,” he clarified. “Strategies that take time and mobilization. I’m not going to rouse you to carry out an impulse. The cart would have passed had I wasted that much time.”

              The recruit still found flaw in that logic, confused. “We should be corresponding as a unit, sir. That’s why we have it.”

              “And the unit will live on past me if I die from my own stupidity. But the only one dying today was this dh’oine, so we can all be grateful.”

              “We don’t want you to end up like Echel, sir.” When Iorveth’s gaze turned sharp on him, he knew he should have held his tongue. But he kept talking, frozen in place. “For you to die…we’d be more than just cold.”

              “You have your coat,” Iorveth said, voice hard now. “ _Go_. You’re keeping others waiting.”

              The recruit turned and saw the unit’s eyes upon him and grew embarrassed of the attention he had garnered. He hurried off, coat in hand, and it wasn’t until he was at his bedroll did he finally put it on.

              To not fall asleep shivering was strange to him. Even at his home, where his last memories were of his mother chiding him for wanting to run off with the Scoia’tael, cold gripped the region just as harshly. But Iorveth cared, cared even more than the queen that existed to tend to her subjects. The recruit, comfortable, fell asleep more easily than he had on any other winter night.

-

              The dark and the cold couldn’t protect them for long. The female soldier—who he had come to call a friend—answered one more of his questions before her demise. She didn’t make a sound when she fell, throat sliced open, and so the lingering traces of her voice remained in her words—

              _“Why doesn’t Iorveth fight for Dol Blathanna? It’d certainly be easier there—no humans, more troops to recruit, mountains to the east…”_

_She laughed. “Why don’t you? If you wanted to go back and pledge fealty to Findabair, you’re free to. We would not hold you to it. Much.”_

_The response flustered the recruit, which she had gotten quite good at doing. “No, no, I mean…he is a hero to them, they would listen to him then, too.”_

_“You really do not know, do you?” she said, idly fiddling with her bowstring. “He is as much a fugitive there as he is here. He is a fox without a foxhole—it’s a waste of time for him to try to dig for one. He’ll be without a home until his dying day, running back and forth in the forest, others catching his scent and following close behind. But wherever home is for them, it’ll never be for him.”_

_She took a glance at Iorveth before returning it to her bow. “I think he yearns for it. Every night, wanting of something deeper, but knowing he can’t ever have it. His dream will always be a dream, but it’s a possibility for us.”_

_“How is that a life to live, though?” the recruit asked._

_“Sometimes you follow a cause. Sometimes you transform into it. Iorveth is the latter, and that’s why I’ll follow him.”_

              Those words echoed in the recruit’s mind as he sobbed into the woman’s coat, her warmth gone from it. Iorveth would die looking for a home, but so had she, and suddenly the thought of battle scared him more than it had his entire life.

-

              “Look sharp,” the recruit heard, and was startled to attention at the voice of his commander. He had volunteered to take part of the watch for the night and lost himself in his own thoughts.

              “I’m sorry,” the recruit replied, feeling shame rise in his gut. “I just…”

              “I know,” Iorveth said, firmly, in a way that showed the recruit wasn’t obliged to answer. “But everyone else depends on you when you take watch. Give them reason to.”

              The recruit went quiet, in his own grief and guilt. He thought everything would go back to that suffocating nightly silence, but, to his surprise, Iorveth kept speaking.

              “She’s been with me for a long time. She liked you quite a bit, you know. Said you asked a lot of questions.”

              The recruit grew nervous, wondering suddenly if everything they had shared had been relayed to their commander. “Y…yes. I suppose that’s true.”

              “I’ll answer one about her for you. She hated Dol Blathanna. Said she never liked the idea of having a home gifted by the dh’oine out of pity. ‘If we’re to be divided, then so be it. But it’ll be on my own terms.’ But she didn’t fight to prove herself right about it. She fought so that non-humans could have that same idea as her, if that’s what they wished. So _you_ wouldn’t have questions and would just _know_.”

              He looked at his commander, stunned by the information given to him. “You knew her that well?”

              “I try to learn what I can. And she takes to people who learn well. I appreciated that about her.”

              “Yes,” he responded emptily. “But now that all dies with her.”

              “You’re thinking too much like a human,” Iorveth stated. “When humans die, their memories are gone. They indulge themselves to forget. When an elf dies, every elf mourns for them. We remember their stories. You remember hers, don’t you?”

              “Yes.”

              “Then don’t forget them. She is not gone from you yet.”

              The recruit nodded, taken aback by both the words and the…gentleness in Iorveth’s voice. It felt wrong to say he didn’t think he could be, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise, in reality. Iorveth was a cause, but Iorveth was an elf too. Within his own stories, he would live on in every part of his unit when he died. Was that why he was so unafraid of death?

              “Fighting is cruel,” Iorveth continued, eye drawn away from him. “Do you think of me as cruel as well?”

              He wondered for a moment if Iorveth was perceptible enough to read his thoughts. “No, sir. What you do—”

              “Is cruelty. Barbarity. Mercilessness.” He rolled every word out carefully as he said them, as if each had their own weight for him. “They expect it, so I give it to them. For every Aen Seidhe they kill, I kill two more humans. What’s that going to do?”

              “I…” the recruit hesitated, feeling as if he was being tested. “Make them think you’re cruel?”

              Iorveth nodded. “They think like that because I encourage it. They want a ‘woodland fox’ to sink its teeth into their babes while they slumber. And that’s who I am. But you don’t think I’m going to do the same to you, do you?”

              “No…not at all. Sir.”

              “I give value back to every elf they want to exterminate. That’s why they hate me. If they get _near_ an elf, I’ll know about it, and I’ll be there. They trust me to. Just like you trust me to lead you.”

              “There’s…more to it though, isn’t there? All the goals of those recruitment posters—"

              “Those are just a bonus,” he said, and the recruit was shocked to see a flash of white from his smile. “Nonhumans will have their land, and if the dh’oine are smart, they’ll know to stay away when I’m near.”

              The recruit went quiet, unsure of what to say.

              “I’m sorry your friend had to die for it. No one deserves that. But she knew the kind of value she had to you and the cause. You have the same value, and so do I. That’s my promise to you.”

              Iorveth seemed so impassioned by his own words that his eye finally locked with the recruit’s, and a chill went down his spine. Being weighed by the gaze that had that much value, that much cruelty—he finally understood.

              “Thank you. I…I’ll try to keep alert, commander.”

              “Don’t bother. Your thoughts are going to keep you too distracted. Try getting some rest—we have a long day tomorrow, and there will be no slowdowns, understand?”

              The recruit nodded, unable to move as long as that eye trapped him in place. When it finally glanced away, he headed back to his bedroll.

              He still couldn’t sleep, but Iorveth’s presence comforted him. He thought without the woman with him he would be afraid to even lie down, her coat in his hands just a stinging reminder of it, but he didn’t.

              Her, Iorveth, and every single one of his allies was steadfast in their fighting. They had no doubts about the road ahead, prepared to live and die to get closer to what they believed. This is what the fighting did for them.

              He should start believing the same, and give a story to be told in his name.

-

              Iorveth gave the order to charge at the witcher, and the recruit leapt forward, no longer afraid of the costs, the losses, when his commander emboldened him so.

              He traded his bow for a sword, having trained himself on the weapon over the months, and charged in past the magical barrier to try to strike at the humans.

              He was caught by a parry from the witcher stronger than he expected, and the shock wracked his arms as a secondary blow came upon him. He couldn’t raise the sword fast enough to strike, and felt his left arm go lame at the cut tearing through tendons.

              The two other elves accompanying him down were cut down expertly, as the witcher moved with the momentum of the battle, and the recruit gave one final charge as he ran in.

              “ _Scoia’tael!_ ” he yelled, slicing through the witcher’s back with his one good hand before he felt a retaliatory swing come towards him.

              The sword was dug into his heart—beating quickly, anxiously—and then pulled out just as easily. The light in his vision dimmed quickly as death took him, body falling alongside his brothers-in-arms.


End file.
